In a ten-week long campaign RadicalGirlsss will go through the myths surrounding pornography, trying to uncover the reality behind the glamour. We’ll be hosting a series of webinars, post reality-checks and foster discussion to understand the operation of this multi-million dollar industry.
NOV 16, 2020
An appeal from Osez le Féminisme!
Three French feminist organisations – Osez le Féminisme!, Le Mouvement du Nid, and Les Effronté.es – are delighted that following their campaigning, the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office has decided to open a preliminary investigation against the company “Jacquie et Michel” for aggravated pimping and rape.
In the face of the flood of testimonies, this trial will be, thanks to the mobilisation of all of us and the courage of the women who are speaking out, a trial against the criminal system that is the “pornographic industry”, an opportunity to hear the survivors of this extreme male violence, and a chance to denounce and put an end to the impunity of pornocrats.
Alongside the victims, we want to support their heroic courage in speaking up and demanding justice. We want to offer them legal and psychological support, constant support at their side. Our associations are also considering becoming civil parties to weigh in on the trial alongside the victims.
To do this, we need resources: Based on 15 victims, we have evaluated a funding requirement of 81 KE (legal support phase 1 = 22%, legal support phase 2 = 55%, psychological support = 7%, transport and hotel costs = 3%, bailiff costs = 11%).
You can support this campaign by:
Pornography has no legally binding definition. However, this term hides a long list of violent and abusive acts which are severely punishable under criminal codes and by international conventions: torture, rape, abuse of vulnerability, pimping, human trafficking, incitement to sexist and racist hatred, sexist and racist insults… Words can be powerful, they can provide impunity for criminals.
All over the world, lawsuits and trials are multiplying and survivors are speaking out. In France, in September, a preliminary investigation against the pornography site “Jacquie and Michel” for rape and pimping was opened by the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office. In October, four French pornographers were indicted for rape, pimping and human trafficking.
What is now referred to as the “porn industry”, with billions of dollars in profits worldwide (219,985 videos are viewed every minute on Pornhub), actually conceals large-scale criminal networks of pimping and human trafficking. The methods used by the porn video production industry are sophisticated and identical to those used by human trafficking networks: grooming, trust-building, submission through rape, exploitation, coercion, and reversal of guilt. It is based on the age-old and misogynistic myth of a woman as a sexual object who is eager for self-destruction.
The filming of sexual acts under economic and psychological coercion, sexual assault and rape, even acts of torture and barbarism are the daily reality of the pornocriminal system. It traps vulnerable women and forces them, in spite of their clearly expressed refusal or by surprise oftentimes, to participate in scenes of sodomy, double penetration, gang rapes, beatings, slapping, choking, suffocation, urination, facial ejaculation in packs… This abuse, rape and torture, leaves women with physical sequelae (anal or vaginal tearing, infection…) as well as serious psycho-traumatic scarring. A picture of a criminal system causing unparalleled violence emerges. This picture is so different from the one the people, who have an interest in making us believe that exploited women have “inordinate sexual appetites”, want us to have.
Only complacency can lead one to believe that a film shoot with extreme acts of violence, can provide something other than physical and psychological pain to the women subjected to it.
The impact of pornography is not limited to the women subjected to violence during the filming, but is imposed on society as a whole.
Pornography glorifies misogyny, racist and lesbophobic hatred and intolerance, resentment towards the poor, paedocriminality, humiliation and dehumanisation of women and girls. In two clicks you can find racist, paedocriminal and misogynistic titles such as “black teen gets fucked by white man” or “submissive slutty schoolgirl”.
Pornography conveys the idea that sexuality is inseparable from brutality. It legitimises violence against girls and women since it is based on sex essentialism: the notion that women are different by nature therefore they need to be degraded in order to experience pleasure. This is the same notion found in rape apology discourse. Thus, pornography caters to the patriarchal ideology that men should dominate women in society. Spanking, choking, corrective rapes… Pornography portrays women who “stay in their place”, subjected to the power of men. It glorifies male domination since it is inspired by, and perpetuate, violence against women.
The systematic imposition of these recurrent and ubiquitous images reduces the sexual imagination of individuals, as the studies cited by feminist sociologist Gail Dines in Pornland show. Thus, whereas sexuality should be a continuum of experience and learning, pornography leads to a dehumanisation of women that is found at all levels of society. Under the guise of freedom, “porn” is in fact the assertion of male sexual privilege, and the possibility for some to take advantage of women’s vulnerability in order to make a fortune.
Like racism, the glorification of hatred and humiliation of human beings -especially women- is illegal. Torture, barbaric acts, rape are criminal acts. The European Convention on Human Rights places the onus on member states to effectively combat all attacks on human dignity. The impunity enjoyed to date by the “porn” criminal networks is clearly a violation of international law!
Een reactie plaatsenFalse allegations of domestic violence are rampant … or are they?
Google “false allegations of domestic violence” and a litany of defense attorneys and men’s rights groups would have you believe that nearly every person who reports domestic violence is lying.
One site even suggests some 70 percent of restraining orders are trivial or false. The article cites a study that concludes 60 percent (not 70 percent as the article proclaimed) of restraining orders are unnecessary or based on false allegations of abuse. But how the “study” got to that number is by discarding any petition for a restraining order that didn’t include actual or threatened physical violence. As any domestic violence advocate or prosecutor will tell you, domestic violence doesn’t only include physical abuse. Other forms of abuse are often predecessors of physical violence, such as stalking, threats or coercive control.
Meanwhile, other sources report the rate of false allegations of domestic violence is low and in line with the rate of false reports of other crimes, such as theft and burglary.
So, why the discrepancy?
Without Physical Proof, Some Survivors Are Labeled Liars
“A lot of it has to do with studies’ biases and methodologies,” says Melissa Hamilton, J.D., Ph.D., visiting criminal law scholar with the University of Houston Law Center. “From a methodological perspective, if you were to count cases that are marked ‘unfounded’ as lies, that’s not sound logic.”
And yet, that’s exactly what some studies on false allegations of domestic violence rely on, according to Hamilton. Just because a case had insufficient evidence to make an arrest or was turned down for prosecution, that doesn’t mean the reporting party made up the abuse.
“A lot of times police are looking for a physical sign of assault, but not all injuries show up right away,” Hamilton says. “So police might close it out as ‘unfounded,’ but it would not be fair to say it’s a false report.”
Police will sometimes mark cases unfounded if they suspect the highly contentious idea of mutual abuse, where its thought that both parties played equal parts in the violence. In reality, self-defense can be incorrectly labeled as mutual abuse when both parties have injuries or both parties admit to using physical violence.
Survivors More Likely to Lie That Abuse Didn’t Occur
According to a 2008 study by law professor Nicholas Bala and three other researchers, in the context of custody disputes, mothers make deliberate false reports less than 2 percent of the time. Fathers are 16 times more likely to make deliberate false reports which contributes to disbelieving true reports made by mothers.
“It is critical to emphasize that the making of false allegations of spousal abuse is much less common than the problem of genuine victims who fail to report abuse,” reads the study.
Deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Family Violence Division, Miji J. Vellakkatel, agrees—it’s far more likely for survivors to lie and say they were not abused when, in fact, they were.
“People do sometimes change their statements from the initial report to preliminary hearing or trial,” Vellakkatel says. “But in most cases, it’s minimization. We tend to get victims saying, ‘It was my fault,’ or they no longer wish to participate. When a person decides not to participate in a case, I think people jump to assume that they were lying.”
But Vellakkatel says he doesn’t think that’s the case.
“In my experience, false reports of domestic violence are very rare,” he says, adding he’s only come across one case in his career that was dismissed because the incident was fabricated.
Vellakkatel encourages survivors to report abuse, even when they’re concerned they might not be believed.
“Do not be concerned about being believed or not. Be concerned about your personal safety or your children’s safety,” he says. “If we do not file a case, it’s not because we didn’t believe you. It’s because there’s insufficient evidence to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Read more about the importance of evidence in criminal and family court and what exactly you should document in “Why You Should Document Abuse.”
Een reactie plaatsenJULY 19, 2022
Created by a German AI company called deepXtech UG, “Am I In Porn?” is a search engine that exists to help you find out if you appear on porn sites.
According to research by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), a nonprofit organization that offers services to victims of cyberbullying and cyber harassment, 1 in 8 is the number of social media-using survey respondents who said that they themselves had been victims of nonconsensual porn, also known as image-based sexual abuse.
And another 1 in 20 even admitted to having shared a sexually graphic image of another person without their consent.
Related: The New York Times Exposé That Helped Spark the Possible Beginning of the End of Pornhub
Those stats clearly exhibit a massive problem, but some underlying issues are making things worse.
Let’s dive into what’s going on and discuss what tools exist to fight the problem.
It’s possible that porn sites are incentivized not to take down nonconsensual porn and rape tapes because they’re popular. More views mean more money from advertisements for the sites, after all.
Take the story of 14-year-old Rose Kalemba, for example. In 2009, she was abducted by men driving around her neighborhood and reportedly raped by them for hours. After being stabbed multiple times and nearly dying, she was able to escape.
Sadly, one nightmare was quickly replaced by another. Only months after the attack, she reportedly discovered six videos of her rape on Pornhub. They were being shared by her schoolmates, and it led to intense bullying from classmates.
Related: How My Images were Stolen, Manipulated, and Nonconsensually Posted to a Porn Site
Rose spent the next half-year emailing Pornhub, requesting that they take down the videos. But, even with her explaining that she was a minor in the videos, her requests came up empty—Pornhub didn’t even respond to her and the videos stayed live on the site.
Finally, Rose set up an email account and contacted Pornhub posing as a lawyer threatening a lawsuit. Within 48 hours of the email, the videos of her were gone.
That’s right: the porn site reportedly ignored the “harmless” underage rape victim for months, but listened to the “credible” lawyer in a matter of days.
And why’d they do this? It might be because they had such a poor content moderation and review system, or because videos of her were maybe helping them rake in more cash. Either way, it doesn’t look good for one of the world’s most popular free porn sites.
Rose’s story isn’t a one-time thing, it’s becoming a more frequent issue. As that’s the case, here are some tips and tools that can help you protect yourself.
According to Caleb Chen, an internet privacy advocate at Private Internet Access, a personal private network service, one thing you can do is make sure your phone isn’t automatically backing up into the cloud.
Related: “I Wasn’t in Control of My Body”: How the Porn Industry Cashes In on Nonconsensual Content
“When you take a photo on an iPhone, it encourages you to back it up on iCloud (a bunch of servers run by Apple) and many users have accepted having all their photos backed up onto the cloud, whether during their phone set-up or later, and then forgotten about it,” explains Chen. “When the photo is sent to the cloud, it is generally encrypted in some way so the cloud provider can’t see what the contents are. The issue is that cloud back-ups can be accessed with an email and password, and those are often not as secure as people think.”
Check out this guide to making sure your phone isn’t automatically backing up into the cloud, if this is a precaution you’d like to take. Note that a risk with not uploading your photos to iCloud is that they’ll need to be backed up elsewhere or else you’ll lose your photos altogether if something were to happen to your phone.
Related: “I Didn’t Know If They’d Kill Me”: What Happened When This Jane Doe was Trafficked by GirlsDoPorn
Another thing you can do is check out the new site “Am I In Porn?” Created by a German AI company called deepXtech UG, “Am I In Porn?” is a search engine that exists to help you find out if you appear on porn sites.
Because victims cannot know if there is “parasite porn” or revenge porn of themselves on the internet until they or someone they know stumbles upon it, it is intended for any person who wants to check that no pornographic content of themselves is distributed on various porn platforms without having to visit those platforms themselves. These can be any number of people including, but not limited to, those who have passed on content to third parties or those who fear that pornographic material has been created and distributed without their knowledge (e.g. by DeepFake technology).
“Am I In Porn?” allows users who are over the age of 18 to match their face with millions of videos and find out within seconds if people in the videos they searched are similar. All you have to do is upload a picture of yourself (which will never be saved) and check the results. The photo only needs to show your face clearly, and the site will only show you the videos that have the highest probability of a match.
How does it make these matches?
Related: MindGeek, Pornhub’s Parent Company, Sued for Reportedly Hosting Videos of Child Sex Trafficking
The simple answer is mathematics. According to the site, every face has a unique arrangement of features, such as eyes, nose, mouth, etc., which have a certain distance between them. Mathematically speaking, these distances and arrangements are things called “vectors.” The site then built a database with millions of vectors, which they extracted from millions of porn videos. As soon as you upload an image, they extract the vectors and match them with their database. The more similar the arrangement of the vectors, the higher the probability that the face is the same.
If and when you find a match, “Am I In Porn?” will provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to quickly and easily report and remove the video on the appropriate platform.
Currently, the site charges a small fee (through PayPal or a SEPA direct debit mandate) for each search to cover their costs and is only available in European Union countries. They are working to change both of those things because they believe “things that make the world a better place should be free” and available to all.
On its face, the law strongly prohibits nonconsensual porn. However, a number of loopholes exist that make it extremely difficult to hold those sharing the illicit imagery responsible. Click here to learn more about how porn sites profit from nonconsensual imagery.
Survivors of nonconsensual image sharing face many disruptive mental health issues that affect their daily lives. And, although they haven’t faced literal sexual assault, in some cases, there are striking similarities between the mental health effects of sexual assault and nonconsensual video creation for survivors.
Related: Their Private Videos Were Nonconsensually Uploaded to Pornhub, and Now These Women are Fighting Back
Porn sites don’t care about your mental health. They don’t care whether or not you were raped. All that matters is money, and how they can profit from content—even if that content displays someone’s real suffering.
So, how many more must be exploited until society recognizes the harms of porn and the porn industry?
This is one of the many reasons we raise awareness on the harms of porn, because many porn sites profit from the creation and distribution of nonconsensual content.
Een reactie plaatsen
Michel Piron and Rick Angel: the two executioners of a woman
New blow for Jacquie and Michel . After the resignation of the boss of the site and the cessation of broadcasting on Canal + , another case affects the brand. Indeed, the media Le Parisien has just revealed the testimony of a woman . A chilling testimony that would relate facts of prostitution and porn shootings without consent. The victim, called Corinne by the media, would have experienced the worst with a porn actor from Jacquie and Michel, incidentally a former political adviser .
A former adviser under Nicolas Sarkozy turned porn actor
In the hotel room, things escalate very quickly. Corinne, seeing that Bastien did not arrive, decides to leave the room . She didn’t want to stay with the two unknown men. In order to prevent him from fleeing, Michel Piron would then have hit him . Subsequently, Corinne therefore stayed the night in the room, for fear of leaving the premises .
The next day, Michel Piron and Rick Angel reportedly posted a video of her on the porn site . “ My brother called Michel Piron to tell him that I had lost everything because of him, that I had suicidal thoughts ,” she revealed in the French media. Corinne would not have received any payment for this filming, her colleagues would even have recognized her on the site and she would have ended up losing custody of her children .
In these terrible accusations, we seem to know one of the kidnappers: Michel Piron, director of Jacquie et Michel. On the other hand, we did not know the one who was called Rick Angel . Know that Rick Angel would be the stage name of a former political adviser , turned porn actor. He would have served as a ministerial adviser under Nicolas Sarkozy . He would have started his career in pornography while he was still in politics. Finally, he would have left the middle to devote himself to his acting career in 2009.